Watching the venerable theatre critic
Nicholas de Jongh’s first full-length play, which centres on the 1953
arrest of John Gielgud for a homosexual “cottaging” offence, one word
kept springing to my mind: Honeyrose. Not a term of gay code, but a
brand of tobacco-free cigarettes such as often used onstage. Although
they maintain the visual illusion, the extraordinarily pervasive pong
ruins the rest of it. The Honeyrose fug which enveloped the Duchess
stage seemed to me emblematic of much of de Jongh’s writing,
particularly in the first act. He enjoys both the absurdity with which
he portrays the Conservative government’s anti-homosexual crusade and
the outrage in his indictment of figures such as Home Secretary David
Maxwell Fyfe and the odious Lord Chief Justice Goddard; but there is
something confected and ostentatious about it all, whiffing of the same
sense of moral superiority that these persecutors felt in themselves,
and it breaks the spell.
If the entire play were in this register, it would only ever be
preaching to the choir. Thankfully, de Jongh shows a much more
sympathetic touch with those characters, er, with whom he is in
sympathy. His Gielgud, beneath the epigrams and the legendary gaffes,
is given an almost touching timidity about the prosecution and its
aftermath; we also see a young civil servant and a then-underage public
schoolboy coming to terms with their own sexuality as a result of the
case. Tamara Harvey’s production (recast since its premiere at the tiny
Finborough pub theatre last year) and Alex Marker’s set design cope
fluidly with the plentiful scene changes required by the script’s
surprisingly televisual scenic structure.
Michael Feast is an actor I love, and this outing is no exception; he
uses just the right amount of impersonation of that clipped, precise
Gielgud voice to leaven his exploration of the character. Celia Imrie
makes an agreeable Dame Sybil Thorndike, although five years younger
than Feast and playing someone more than 20 years older than Gielgud.
David Burt relishes a number of cameos from a waiter in a gay club to a
discreet lavatory attendant. But there is often a sense that the author
is trying to have his cake and eat it, as when a character condemns as
a “ghastly little gossip sheet” the
Evening
Standard, for which de Jongh now writes. The chuckle is a smug
one.
Written for the Financial
Times.